People & Body
People & Body is the largest emoji category, holding 2,430 entries on EmojiSelect. It contains everything human: hand gestures, individual people, professions, families, and body parts — plus the skin-tone and hair variants that make those emoji personal. The size comes from the modifier system: since Unicode 8.0 (2015), most people emoji accept one of five skin-tone modifiers derived from the Fitzpatrick scale, so a single base emoji can appear as six distinct characters, each with its own codepoint sequence.
About this category
The category also contains the most technically interesting emoji: ZWJ sequences. Many professions and family configurations are built from simpler emoji joined with the zero-width joiner (U+200D). A family of four is not one character but a sequence of component people linked into a single glyph, which is why not every older system renders them the same way. Our technical section on each page shows exactly which codepoints make up every sequence.
Because modifiers multiply entries, the 2,430 items here are organized by subcategory — hand fingers, people, gestures, roles, activities, families and body parts — and every person, hand and body part that accepts skin tones links to its six tone variants. The category page also links the skin-tone reference, so the whole modifier system is one click away.
2,430 Emoji16 subcategories
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Popular emoji
2,430 Emoji
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16 subcategories · 2,430 Emoji in this category
Go deeper: Flags
Professions & roles
Showing 60 / 492 Emoji
People at activity
Showing 60 / 408 Emoji
Families
Showing 60 / 337 Emoji
People at sport
Showing 60 / 308 Emoji
People gesturing
Showing 60 / 180 Emoji
People
Showing 60 / 168 Emoji
Fantasy people
Showing 60 / 158 Emoji
Open hand fingers
Showing 60 / 66 Emoji
Hands
Showing 60 / 62 Emoji
Partially open hands
54 Emoji
Closed hands
48 Emoji
Body parts
48 Emoji
Single-finger hands
42 Emoji
People resting
30 Emoji
Hand props
18 Emoji
People symbols
11 Emoji
Why it matters
People & Body emoji carry identity, and identity is sensitive. Choosing a skin tone is a personal statement, not a requirement — the default yellow tone is deliberately neutral. We document the six-tone system on every eligible page and keep the modifiers one tap away in search and on the keyboard. The category's growth tells its own story: professions arrived as ZWJ sequences in Emoji 4.0 (2016), the handshake gained tone modifiers in Emoji 12.0, and each release since has expanded roles, gestures and family compositions.
Highlights
Hands and fingers: 👋👍👏🤝 are among the most-copied emoji on the platform and all support skin-tone modifiers.
Professions: doctor, chef, firefighter and dozens more are ZWJ sequences combining a person, a gender and an object.
Families: parents with children exist as sequences, with the member composition fixed by Unicode — our pages list every combination.
How people use them
Approving something quickly: 👍.
Thanking someone: 🙏 followed by a 😊.
Welcoming a new colleague: 👋 plus a 🤝.
Representing yourself: pick a tone once — our keyboard remembers your recent tones.